Community Updates/2008-12-15

From Openmoko

Welcome back everybody to the Seventh edition of our Community Updates newsletter. It was actually chilly around here, especially when John announced that the Optimization Team was disbanded, but there was still no release. A perfect weather to sip hot drinks from a fan mug bought at the newly opened Openmoko merchandise online store. The money will go to community projects, for example bounties set up at cofundos.org, where ideas and money-rich but time-poors users can meet the enterprising hackers.

FDOM successfully moved its build system to an OpenEmbedded overlay and is considering jumping over from ASU stable to ASU testing.

Qt Extended (formerly Qtopia). The currently best version seem to be Hypnotize's unofficial ones. Lorn (our liaison Software Engineer at Nokia) will try to get an official snapshot out before the solstice.

Hackable:1 build system is ready, image released and "how you can join" email.

Infrastructure

The hottest and bloodiest kernels are at Andy's. They have Nicolas Dufresne's patches for WSOD, a power supply driver (pcf50633 rewrite), touchscreen reliability improvements, a WLAN driver using the mainline SDIO stack, almost Android-readiness, plus all the Kernel features and fixes between 2.6.24 and 2.6.28, especially resume/suspend improvements. As these kernels are larger than 2MB, one need to meddle with u-Boot or use Qi to test them and the newer /sys.

Openmoko used to build its distribution using its own copy of OpenEmbedded's Bitbake tree, hosted in its own git under project name org.openmoko.dev. That project has been terminated. Local changes are now being backported upstream so that FSO and everybody else benefits. From now on, further fixes or updates should be directly committed upstream to OpenEmbedded

Hardware

Erin documented how to use the OBEX protocol to send files via Bluetooth.

Community

By popular demand, Openmoko opened a virtual merchandise store online. Everybody is invited to post cool t-shirts design. Profits will go to bounties and other programs to aid the community. pyneo fans note that their favorite distribution has its own online shop.

The community is trying out the bounty system at cofundos.org. As a start, there is one offer for the accelerated X driver, but media player, volume control/mixer, wifi network manager have also been discussed. This is still a social experiment. We need help and more discussion to define the bounties and claim conditions more precisely.

opkg.org was updated. There is now a simple REST interface (API documentation) to query the database, and a "source code URL" field. Thank you Tobias for this useful community service !

Geocaching is a high-tech treasure hunting game played throughout the world by adventure seekers equipped with GPS devices. The basic idea is to locate hidden containers, called geocaches, outdoors and then share your experiences online. Geocaching is enjoyed by people from all age groups, with a strong sense of community and support for the environment. Here is a small script to play it with TangoGPS.

JesusMcCloud created a finger friendly keyboard layout for Illume, with bigger Symbols. You can find more information and a photo in the german freeyourphone.de forum

Did you know it? Sean Moss-Pultz introduced OpenMoko's Neo1973 on November 7th, 2006. It was the "Mystery Guest" at the inaugural Open Source in Mobile (OSiM) conference in Amsterdam. The link to the presentation on Openmoko:Current_events is broken, but one can still web archive the PDF or read it online at linuxdevices. Oh, the screenshots looked so cool on the presentation !

Direct from Openmoko

The optimization team finished their work a few weeks ago. No formal update was released so far. According to testing reports, the image is only a little better than 2008.9 update. There are still about 10 critical bugs that an end user would not accept in a smartphone product. Three of those bugs should be already fixed in the latests (2.6.28) kernels, however. There are also GTK regressions remaining compared to 2007.2.

Wolfgang Spraul explained Openmoko's software strategy for the next 6 months as follows:

1. Current stable image

Our current stable image is Om2008.9
We are sometimes cherry-picking fixes into it, but admittedly not as many as we would like. If someone wants to step up to become stable maintainer for this image and cherry-pick more fixes into it, please let me know.
Alternatively, a number of other images are available, see Distributions.

2. Mickey's framework milestones

As many people know, the next big thing for Openmoko will be Mickey's FSO OpenmokoFramework around D-bus and Python, and the Paroli telephony UI. A few weeks ago, Mickey released milestone 4. In late January, he plans to come out with milestone 5, in late March with milestone 6.

3. Next major release, Om2009

After the next 2 FSO milestones, Openmoko will fork off a stable branch, and spend 2-3 months on testing and bug fixing. This will lead to our next major release, Om2009. The telephony UI will be Paroli, see http://code.google.com/p/paroli/
The way things are going right now, we will probably have this release mid-next year.

Position available

Openmoko is looking for a serious distribution maintainer. Someone who can do the exceptionally hard work of distribution integration, fixing bugs, small and large, from top to bottom of the stack, from UI to kernel, across many packages. Someone with a proven Free Software background. Any applications just email Wolfgang Spraul < wolfgang at openmoko.com > .